Grow Your Own Green Shoots

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

By Miri Thomas

“Grow your own”, like “Make do and mend”, has become a mantra for the current economic times. That makes the horticulture sector one of the few to be seeing year-on-year growth during this recession.

Martin Harvey, managing director of Marshalls Garden Catalogues, estimates that UK sales of vegetable seeds are up 20 percent from last year, with new gardeners accounting for about half of that growth. He believes that the “big four” vegetable seeds companies—Marshalls, Suttons, Thompson & Morgan (T&M), and Unwins—are each enjoying a sales rise of 20-40 percent and “seeing growth in sectors where compact, easy-to-grow, high-yield-per-square-metre veg predominate”.

It’s not surprising, then, that some marketers are expanding their offering to take advantage of the gardening trend. Nor is it surprising that some traditional gardening cataloguers are tweaking their product ranges and marketing efforts, to better appeal to novices.

Etailer The Recycle Works launched GardeningWithChildren.co.uk earlier this year to encourage food production and healthy eating among children. Meanwhile Tesco-owned garden centre Dobbies is reported to have ramped up demonstrations, workshops, and presentations to customers and schools following an 82-percent leap in annual sales of its grow-your-own range of fruit and vegetables.

Long known for its kitchenware, Lakeland in March launched a 96-page spin-off catalogue featuring more than 350 gardening and outdoor-cooking products. Designed by CHS Creative, the catalogue was positioned as a logical extension to the Lakeland brand. “Our challenge,” says CHS’s head of catalogue, Scott Marlow, “was to make it feel different from the core catalogues we rebranded over a year ago whilst ensuring its look and feel was unmistakably Lakeland.”

Lakeland partnered with T&M to sell an exclusive range of its seeds and even included a pack of easy-to-grow salad-leaf seeds with its initial gardening catalogues. This tie-up benefits T&M as well as Lakeland, by helping the former expand its reach. T&M has formed a number of similar partnerships with newspapers and other cataloguers; it supplies seeds to gardening etailer Greenfingers, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Mail, and News of the World, among others. Chief executive John May confirms that T&M is in discussions with additional cataloguers and online retailers.

T&M also recently bought the GetGrowing online domain name and plans to make it an ecommerce site selling vegetable seeds. Although he couldn’t give a launch date, May says the site will have a community feel and offer handy tips and advice to make growing your own vegetables more accessible.

As part of its initiatives to capitalise on Britain’s hunger for home-grown produce, Suttons is a partner in the Grow Your Own National Campaign, a coalition of businesses including B&Q, Dobbies, and Sainsbury’s and organisations such as the Royal Horticultural Society, the National Trust, and the Soil Association supported by a Defra-funded project team. The campaign encourages consumers to reduce the environmental footprint of their diet in part by growing their own. Suttons is also working to extend its range of vegetable-growing hardware—a selection of gardening equipment is available on the Suttons website in partnership with sister company Ferndale Lodge—and is increasing its off-the-page advertising.

To better appeal to a new, and often younger, generation of gardeners as well as to fend off competitors, Marshalls “radically transformed” its catalogue during the past year. It increased the page count from 124 to 148 and added more lifestyle photography, planting information, and recipes. The new Marshalls catalogue, mailed last September, produced a 34.9-percent uplift in year-on-year sales for the period of September to December and helped the company win an ECMOD Award this spring.

“Will [increased] competition affect the traditional big players? It’s a resounding no,” Harvey insists. “Talk to the boys who are established horticulturists, dyed-in-the-wool direct marketers, and smart traders, and they do not seem too worried about what the new players will throw at them—but they do watch each other’s each and every competitive move.”

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